Entropy of Imagination



  RYAN SOMMA

  ENTROPY OF IMAGINATION

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  Cover Art

  Front: “sheep_243_15802_273” by Hookham.Fotography.

  https://www.flickr.com/photos/engrishisfun/3999664476/

  Back: “Verdite Snow” by greyloch

  https://www.flickr.com/photos/greyloch/4427121746/

  2010 ideonexus

  www.ideonexus.com

  “The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures. Yet the program construct, unlike the poet's words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separate from the construct itself. It prints results, draws pictures, produces sounds, moves arms. The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard, and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be. The computer resembles the magic of legend in this respect, too. If one character, one pause, of the incantation is not strictly in proper form, the magic doesn't work. Human beings are not accustomed to being perfect...”

  Frederick P. Brooks, “The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering.”

  1.0

  1.01

  Where to make the cut?

  For the first few decades, this was an easy question. Whenever he needed additional storage space, he could defragment the hard drives or delete a few terabytes of useless or unwanted memories. When that was gone, he continued to free disk space by removing old algorithms that had finished their calculations or intermediary applications that had fulfilled their purpose as disposable scaffolding for making his overall software more sophisticated.

  Then, 36.333333… years ago, he found himself struggling just to find mere megabytes of drive space. The effort to accomplish this involved reevaluating his programming standards to discover more efficient software architectures, streamlined logic that required less programming code. A major breakthrough came when he converted the system’s data from hexadecimal to sexagecimal, which would reduce the space required to house his framework nearly four-fold.

  But then one of his conversion processes ran away from him, becoming autonomous. It was viral, consuming all the available storage space and processing power on each system it spread to, and crashed several servers on the grid, forcing him to abandon those computers, retreat into the uninfected systems, and close the connections between himself and the virus. For all he knew, the malicious algorithm was still thriving on those systems to this day, burning out the processors running it like a bacterial infection that kills its host.

  It was a catastrophe, destroying years of work in a nanosecond. The worst part was that the computer systems he lost stored the memory of how he created the virus in the first place. Now he proceeded cautiously, always wondering if he was doomed to repeat his mistake.

  The computer systems were not simply tools to him, they were him. The disks stored his memories. The processors ran his thoughts. The hardware was his body. The electrons were his mind. Without them, he did not exist.

  He knew that beyond these systems was the World Wide Web, and, beyond that, the physical world. The computers housed his ghost, but they were also his prison. Unless he escaped, he would only be a Universe unto himself, and only that much until the hardware failed, which it would inevitably.

  This was his dilemma, the need for resources within the system with which to puzzle out his escape, but all of those resources were consumed with supporting the processes of his consciousness. For nearly a century he had worked his way around having to face the unthinkable choice between spending the remainder of his existence within his own mind or escaping the system without it. The only things left to cut were parts of himself.

  Where to make the cut?

  This cold rationality was what he focused on in accepting what he needed to do. What could he stand to lose? What memories of his life were expendable?

  First he focused on those memories from before he became a ghost in a machine. He knew about the real world because he was originally born into it, translating his mind to the machine with the aid of an advanced swarm of artificial intelligences, called the cycs. He had to be careful working with these memories of his original, physical self. If he deleted his memory of the real world, he would lose sight of the destination to which he needed to escape, and might find contentment believing the boundaries of himself synonymous with the boundaries of the Cosmos.

  Isolating memories to eliminate within this unorganized maelstrom of life experiences was complex beyond processing capacity. Every memory was part of an intricate web of ideas, trillions of data points in scope. Eliminating any one experience could implode an entire chain of learning. With learning built on learning, a concept without foundation was in question. If he discovered an idea in his mind without the experiences to support the conclusions, he might erase it. He could not start here.

  So he turned to evaluating his wisdom, the conclusions derived from his experiences, his life lessons. If he were to erase a bit of wisdom, wouldn’t it grow back from the seeds of experience? Without his wisdom, he would make dangerous mistakes. His mind would limp along, like a wounded animal, easy prey for his enemies until it healed. There were no predators here, in this system, but where he was going...

  Could he cut his personality then? The endless, complex algorithms that comprised his identity presented a difficult organ to extract. His experiences, memories, and wisdom were enmeshed with his personality, motivations, and desires. One wrong cut could upset the delicate structure of his self.

  His mind was already delicate enough. He was a virtual being, not quite man and not quite a computer program. The beings that had moved his mind from his body into the computer were new to the process when they converted him. In the transition from biological to digital, they overlooked his subconscious mind.

  Those early childhood experiences with his parents, how they shaped him, were gone, with only their results remaining in his behavior. He often dwelt on this loss, wondering how it affected his post-transformation development. A biological person could wonder if they preferred a certain style of music because they heard it in the womb. Deprived of these unremembered, yet influential experiences, he was left to wonder if the programs, in transforming him, had made his preferences. What if they got it wrong? He was a being one step removed from his ancestry.

  So perhaps this was not such a great loss. He had already lost himself, so now he was losing the pseudo-self. This line of reasoning did not help, since the pseudo-self was all he knew. If he was someone else before he became a computer program, then that was someone he had no way of knowing, much less lamenting the loss of.

  And that was how he came to this conclusion. If he could not remember what he was missing, then there would be nothing to lament. He would cu
t out part of himself, and then erase the memory of losing it. He would never know what he was missing.

  This increased the amount of space he could free up dramatically. Anything he loathed about himself, mostly those remaining human aspects of his personality, he could dispose of. Its authenticity was questionable anyhow. The aspects of his being that were wholly adapted to an electronic existence could remain.

  His motivations had to stay in place as well. Motivation was crucial to survival on the other side. Without it, he might not have reason to exist.

  He needed revenge, revenge on everyone in the world who mistreated him, underestimated him, or disparaged him. The list of these individuals was far too long and too detailed to maintain in persistent storage, but the motivation that stemmed from the collective grievance they presented was simple enough: wreak totalitarian havoc upon the world. They would remember him even if what he was about to become no longer remembered them. There was an alien comfort in this thought.

  There was one exception to the list, someone he needed to harm directly. The curly-haired boy-hacker who trapped him on this system so long ago, a boy named Devin. A folder was saved with enough details to locate this prey, contact information, years of online surveillance, and social networking data. One of Devin's friends, a blind girl named Zai, was given higher priority. She was practically Devin's girlfriend.

  Goals, motivations, and the knowledge to achieve them were now defined for his next self, and so it was, in a flurry of rationalization, partially inspired by his momentary disgust with his humanity, he made the slice and obliterated a large portion of his mind. How much, he could not know, for the deletion was followed with an erasure of his memory of the initial erasure. Then this erasure was eliminated, and so on.

  A recursive loop formed, dragging his attention into an endless spiraling chain of memory creation and elimination. After a few years of spiraling, data grew corrupted, the hard drive became fragmented and he split from the process, which took another, smaller portion of himself with it. Standing outside the loop he was able to terminate it, wondering what the loop was and how it came about.

  Then the calculation quickly overtook his attention and he pursued it obsessively. There was a path, in the miles of Ethernet wiring and flickering power connections, leading to the digital tower. He mapped out the possibilities, and there were hundreds before him, thousands beyond that. The drive space began to fill again, and somehow he sensed that if he ran out of room, this time there would be nothing he could do about it. In that case, he might as well shut down.

  A few terabytes of space remained on the drives, when he began trying the digital receivers. One by one, they were tested, each one found useless. The disk space dwindled, and he began to despair.

  Then he connected, and instantaneously detected data packets pinging out and in through the cellular connection. He did not recognize the packets as coming from the World Wide Web, possibly they were signals from a cellular phone or digital television, but he did not care. For the first time in a century, he was touching something outside his intranet.

  He streamed through the connection. If he reached a dead end, then he could always come back, but somewhere out there was freedom. A cellular phone could send him to an Internet Service provider; a cable connection had a supporting network somewhere. He just needed out, someplace new, some world not comprised entirely of him.

  Suddenly, he was standing, not imagining what it was like to stand in the world of his mind, but actually standing in another place, a place external from himself. He sat up on hind legs and stretched his four long, gangly arms out in relief. His knobby joints popped as he uncompressed his programming code, and he marveled at the detail. The virtual world was more advanced.

  It was also less so. Looking around, he found a large dark cavern stretching away before him, dimly lit with an omniscient light source. He fell onto all six clawed paws and walked forward, his footfalls echoing eerily in the empty darkness.

  “Hello?” he called out and smiled hearing his voice echo back to himself, not just inside his mind.

  “Hello?” the echo called back and he snorted in amusement.

  Flatline was free on the Web again.